Solution Saturday: Help! My Leader is a Morale Buster!

We have a new principal who is a morale buster to say the least, but teachers have also described her as “bully”, sneaky, liar, plays favorites, doesn’t listen, doesn’t care, condescending, rude, etc…

Unfortunately, the titles fit her actions and despite numerous seasoned teachers and even her own VP speaking up, she refuses to acknowledge there is a problem with communication, organization and especially morale. Teachers are miserable.

In a matter of 2 weeks on 5 occasions staff brought up major morale issues. At one point we even brought up that teacher morale directly affects student learning. (Edited)Later that week, a seasoned teacher went in to address morale again and the principal said, “Morale is not my problem. Morale is an individual issue and teachers are responsible for their own morale.”

The teacher was crushed. She wanted to say, “YOU are responsible for the current morale issues. We can all cite your attitude, your lack of communication, your actions that directly impact teachers and have sent the already fragile morale, into an all out nose dive. 17 of 26 are planning not to return. So here is my question/issue. Am I absolutely crazy to think that leadership has a responsibility to support and drive positive morale? In all of my years in city government leadership I would have never thought to put blame of morale on my staff.

If morale is low, there has to be self reflection, leadership must consider their role in the issues, leadership or lack thereof, has a responsibility to drive morale for the sake of an organization.

Discouraged by Low Morale

Dear Low,

Your email is heartbreaking. You bring up the uncomfortable truth that leadership-influence cuts both ways, for better or worse.

Culture and morale-building begin with leadership. It’s nearly impossible to effect significant change, in hierarchical organizations, without buy-in from top leaders. However, I have a few suggestions.

#1. Get out if you can.

Move to a school that better suits your hopes and expectations.

If you plan to stay…

#2. Be the leader you wish you had.

It feels like the teachers are dancing around an opportunity. You wrote, “She wanted to say, “YOU are responsible for the current morale issues.” What is preventing your team from taking charge of morale-building?

Yes, I wrote that it’s nearly impossible to change culture without top leadership’s buy-in. But it’s not impossible.

Make a list of everything you wish your Principal would do to build morale and do it. It won’t be easy. Leadership isn’t easy.

You can’t change everything. You can change something.

Gather a small group of influential teachers.

Describe what you want. What are people doing in a high-morale culture?

Take action to build morale where you are. It’s challenging, but you can create pockets of energy inside a dark organization.

A leadership gap is your opportunity to make a difference.

#3. Channel frustration.

Anger is energy. The problem with anger is it’s usually focused on things you don’t want. You can’t build a positive culture by focusing on things you don’t want.

What positive behaviors and outcomes does frustration suggest. It’s not enough to determine what must stop. What must start?

#4. Adopt the 3X rule.

Watch your words. Your words reflect your future. You can talk about the darkness all you want as long as you talk about the light three times more.

You don’t mean to, but the way you’re talking propagates low morale. I’m not suggesting that you employ fake happy talk. I’m suggesting that you talk about what you want and ways to achieve it without your Principal’s involvement.

Words are rudders. If all you talk about is what’s wrong, you make things darker.

The only reason to open your mouth is to make something better.

Talk about:

Behaviors within your control.

Small successes. Establish weekly celebrations that honor morale building successes.

Purpose. Turn your focus to the students you love and serve. Why are you teaching in the first place?

#5. Embrace your personal power.

I’m not suggesting that you try to bully your Principal into submission. Don’t let one person ruin your work experience.

Forget about the Principal for a minute. You’ve let yourself get sucked into a black hole. Pat each other on the back. Give high-fives while walking down the hall.

Take charge of your immediate circle of influence.

Tips:

Let go of fairness. It’s not fair that you have to deal with a lousy leader. The truth is, many people do. The need for fairness destroys our power.

Work with leaders who get it. Stop focusing on the one leader who holds you back.

Practice kind candor. Continue to speak the truth as you see it.

Take positive actions without asking permission. Ask for forgiveness after, if necessary.

Do things you can brag about in the newspaper.

I imagine a school where teachers are constantly leading micro-celebrations of each other, staff, and students. Your Principal can’t stop that.

I imagine a group of teachers who decide to build the culture they aspire to enjoy.

There is a quote from a US Civil War general, Albert Sidney Collins:
“Morale is faith in the man at the top.”
Individuals might be responsible for their own morale, but because the leader can have such an impact, it is absolutely incumbent on all leaders to remember this and act accordingly.

Wow, so disturbing.
Channel the energy of anger to a positive team engagement. Anger fuses anger, each of you have the power to change the course.
You teach the class the Principal is not in the class, so do what you do to increase morale there first. Get the other Teachers on board as a whole to grow the movement to a positive culture! Let the school board deal with the Principal, challenge them to do their job too.
Together you can make a difference, starts with “one”, soon to be 101!

It’s the primary responsibility of a leader to build a right good culture with own demonstration and behavior. However, the team can also drive the positive work culture by following the set norms and standard work procedures. The team can actually push a leader to follow right good things keeping the external customers in mind. In such cases, the drivers of business growth can be Customer Satisfaction and Organization Culture of Reliability & Trust.

Hi, Dan. I appreciate your sound advice to the teacher. I am in a position of leadership in a school district. “Turn your purpose to the students you love and serve. Why are you teaching in the first place?” Great teachers (and others in similar employment roles) have a key responsibility to those that THEY serve. Poor leadership is disheartening, to say the least, but teachers can never let it impact their purpose. Great “Solution Saturday”, Dan. Thank you.

As a past president of a labor organization, I was once quoted in the local newspaper saying “Morale is low” during difficult times and it was. I was summoned to the leader’s office and he explained the definition and philosophy of morale, blah, blah, blah. I responded with “Okay, from now on, I’ll simply respond with ‘We are not happy’ when asked about the working conditions here.” It eventually got better but not overnight. Good advice from you and others but I think it is important to remember that the Principal also has a boss and votes of “no confidence” might be considered as a last resort option along with the well-articulated reasons and justifications for doing so. Extreme measures well-planned should not be overlooked. Good luck….I feel your pain, or rather, I once did.

Thanks SGT. I considered suggesting a more radical point. However, I didn’t want to take responsibility. I thought about the possibility that some teachers who are retiring might go over the Principals head. Perhaps as a last resort that’s an option.

So as a Superintendent who will soon be the Executive Director of the Vermont Principals Association, there has been some great advice, starting with you Dan. Just a reminder, that most school systems have some type of Chain of Command, or Complaints about Personnel, policy that they can fall back on. Follow the outlined procedures if you have legitimate concerns. School leaders, like all leaders, need to be responsive to feedback from the people they are tasked with leading. An effective Superintendent is not going to want an ineffective principal leading a school. Great post!

A fellow Associate told me when I asked him why he doesn’t offer his ideas at the Director-Associates meetings he replied, “When they care about what I think, they will ask me.” He was correct; they didn’t really care what we thought. I had thought that my fellow Associate was afraid to speak up but he wasn’t, he just needed to be asked and since he had a Master’s in engineering management he should have been asked. The Directors on the other hand thought that when we did not speak up we had nothing to offer. I know that because I asked a director what they thought of those of us who did not speak up.

My Boss, a Director, was asked during our senior staff department meeting, “Why are we having senior staff meetings?” and he replied, “because we want to know what our employees are thinking.” The other Director replied, “That’s not the reason, the Associates have raised the issue of poor communications between the Directors and the employees.” I had lobbied my 14 fellow associates that we had to meet and figure out how to help the company avoid bankruptcy; we were all stockholders and I took my 1% ownership seriously. Our staff CPA had begged me to “get the Associates to do something to avoid bankruptcy.” I told him to tell the Directors and he replied. “I did but they are incapable of doing anything about it.”

Nine months into my Executive MBA program my boss heard that I was encouraging the Associates to do something and he was furious. After a three hour private meeting where he demonstrated his ignorance of management practices we went to the first of six lectures by our management consultant who was hired to placate the bank that was about to shut us down, i.e., cancel our line of credit. The consultant would say to me, “Bob, you could finish this lecture,” which did not sit well with those on the Board. No one on the Board had a degree in management let alone an advanced degree in management.

In the spring of the second year of the Executive MBA program the EMBA class went to England for a week of international studies. When I returned, six weeks before graduation, I was laid off after 20 years. No good deed goes unpunished.

Anyway, one of the methods used to help the board of directors understand the employees was employee interviews by the consultant of all the top people and most other employees. During the debriefing the consultant said he did know how to present their findings so for two hours he read employee comments. It was clear there was a major communications problem. A common thread among the directors was that, “employees complain when times are good and complain more when times are bad, employees just complain.”

The funny thing is the bank manager went to my brother (a CPA and well-versed in such problems) to ask him how to manage such a dysfunctional board. After listening to the symptoms for 20 minutes he told the bank manager that the company was the XYZ company. The bank manager was shocked since she never mentioned the company name, town, industry nor even the number of employees. He told her his brother had worked there for 20 years and told him the same story. The board didn’t seem to listen to each other let alone their bank manager or their employees.

At the first ever directors/associates meeting (which was held after I conducted the first ever associates only meeting) all of the directors said they had good communications with their associates–they were stunned to learn we did not agree with them, one-way communications is not adequate but it is preferred by many executives.

Several months after I left a Director asked the Associates, “why are you all so quiet during Director-Associate meetings?” A future company president said, “Where’s Gately?” Truth to power is often punished, not rewarded. My advice to employees who sense that things should be better is to look around and find one of the top 20% of businesses to work for and apply there.